SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories from the Lotus Sutra

Dogen-Zenji so cherished the Lotus Sutra that he actually carved a selection of it into his door. This, the core text of not only Zen but the whole of Mahayana Buddhism, has never lost its appeal among practitioners of the Way. Join us for our SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories From the Lotus Sutra led by Sensei Joshin Byrnes, Sensei Genzan Quennell

photo of Wendy Johnson by Roshi Joan Halifax

Over the last year I have been immersed in the study of a beautifully written book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which is dedicated to the plaiting together of supple strands of indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. The author of this book, Robin Wall Kimmerer, is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a trained botanist and Distinguished Teaching Professor at New York’s SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

This season Kimmerer will offer a daylong teaching on Three Sisters Farming and Native foodways at our local community college and organic farm. Unfolding in the heart of the five-acre Indian Valley Organic Farm and Garden, this teaching will honor the sacred crop trinity of persistent agriculture: corn, beans, and squash.

At this time of bounty I return regularly to a chapter in Robin’s book titled “The Honorable Harvest.” Here she reminds the reader that traditional ecological knowledge is rich in prescriptions for sustainability and alive with detailed protocols for maintaining vitality in the more than human world:

• Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them.

• Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life.

• Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer.

• Never take the first. Never take the last.

• Take only what you need.

• Take only that which is given.

• Never take more than half. Leave some for others.

• Harvest in a way that minimizes harm.

• Use the harvest respectfully. Never waste what you have taken.

• Share.

• Give thanks for what you have been given.

• Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken.

• Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the earth will last forever.

Although the exact ethos of the honorable harvest is buried in the ground of antiquity, its noble litany rises up from the earth, filling body and mind. To my chagrin, I noticed when I first began to study the book that I am far more reverent and mindful in the presence of botanical and human Native American elders than I am in the privacy of my boisterous home garden. With grateful humility I ceremoniously harvest a single ear of Seneca white corn, while in my home paradise I cut buckets of heirloom roses with wanton abandon.

Up until a few months ago I wondered at this unusual wobble in my moral compass. Then wonder dropped to disoriented shame when I learned that our Buddhist-trained family was overusing its modest irrigation water allotment for Muir Beach home gardens. In this bone-dry season of drought and climate disruption, what would the Coast Miwok people do? Offer thanks, take only what is needed and given from the land, and share a meal of pale ash acorn mush garnished with redmaid flower seeds.

This water fiasco shook my Zen world. I returned to the guidelines for honorable harvest to find ballast. We live on the banks of Redwood Creek, a seven-mile wild run stream protected for silver salmon, members of the endangered Coho line. Although irrigation water is never drawn from this creek, in a healthy watershed system all waters are connected. So with water bill in hand, I followed the low brown thread of Redwood Creek out to its mouth in the Pacific. Rather than introduce myself, I stood in the cold briny waves of the ocean and apologized for unmindful overdraught of sweet water. Then I dried off and got to work. . . .